Design Studio

The best interface idea in the room often belongs to someone who never gets asked to draw. A design studio gets everyone sketching, then turns dozens of rough ideas into one direction the team owns.

Overview

A design studio is a timeboxed workshop for early user experience design. Frame the problem with a persona and a scenario, then have each person sketch several solutions alone, fast and rough, in five to ten minutes. Each person presents to the group, and the group critiques against the problem, not on taste. Pairs or small groups then merge the strongest ideas into a single sketch, and the whole group repeats until one direction emerges. Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden made it a standard part of Lean UX.

We run it in early discovery, often inside a dojo challenge, whenever a product has a user experience component. Engineers, testers, and product managers sketch alongside designers. Sketching on its own produces many ideas; the critique and the convergence produce the shared understanding. When the team builds the result, it’s building something it drew. It’s set-based design on paper: keep many options open, then narrow on evidence. Bring a user journey or a story map so the sketches have a workflow to fit into.

Resources

• Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden, “Lean UX: Creating Great Products with Agile Teams” (O’Reilly, 2021)
• Set-Based Design — the principle behind diverge-then-converge
• Dojo Loop: Do — where we run it in a dojo challenge